Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am drew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is doctor jie zac e. Doctor jamal zai is a professor of psychology at stanford university. He is also the director of the social neuroscience laboratory at stanford. His laboratory focuses on key aspects of the human experience, such as empathy and cynicism, which lie at the heart of our ability to learn and can be barriers to learning, such as the case with cynical m today, you'll learn the option able insets to adopt when trying to understand how to learn conflict resolution and how to navigate relationships of all kinds and in all context, including personal relationships and in the workplace.

What said doctors oke's work apart from others is that he is able to take a laboratory research and apply that to real world scenarios to direct optimal strategies for things like how to set personal boundaries, how to learn information in uncertainty, sometimes even uncomfortable environment, and then how to bring that to bear in terms of your relationship to yourself, your relationship to others, and how to collaborate with others in more effective ways. I want to be very clear that today's discussion, while focused on cynical m trust and empathy, is anything but squishy. In fact, IT focuses on experimental data derived from real world context, so IT is both grounded in solid research and IT is very practical, such that by the end of today's episode, you'll be armed with new knowledge about what cynical m is and is not, what empathy is and is not.

This is very important because there is a lot of confusion about these words and what they mean. But I can assure you that by the end of today's discussion, you have new frameworks and indeed new tools, protocols that you can use as strategies to Better navigate situations and relationships of all kinds, and indeed, to learn Better. I'd also like to mention the karzai has authored a terrific new book entitled hope for cynics, the surprising science of human goodness.

And i've read this book and IT is spectacular. There is a link to the book in the shown note captions. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is maui news.

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Thanks so much for .

having me delay to have you here and to learn from you. You have decided to tackle an enormous number of very interesting and chAllenging topics. ChAllenging because my read of IT, not just your book, but of these fields in the science that you've done, is that people default to some complicated states and emotion sometimes that in some ways serve them well, in some ways serve them as well.

So i'd like to talk about this at the level of the individual and interactions between pairs and larger groups and so on. But just to kick things off, what is cynical? M, you, I have my own ideas, but what is cynical? M, what does IT serve in terms of its role in the human mind?

The way that psychologists think of cynical, and these days is, as a theory, a theory about human beings, is the idea that generally, people at their core are selfish, greedy and dishonest. Now that's not to say that a cynical person will deny that somebody could act kindness, for instance, could donate to charity, could help a stranger, but they would say, all of that, all of that kind and friendly behavior is a thin venir covering up who we really are, which is self interested. Another way of putting this is you, there are these ancient philosophical questions about people, are we good or bad, kind or cruel, Carrying or callous and cynisca answering all of those in the relatively bleak way that you .

might believe in your book. You quote kt vanette, who says, we are who we pretend to be, so we need to be careful who we pretend to be. what? What do you think that quote means? How do you interpret that quote?

Thanks for being that up. Could find a one of my favorite authors. And to me, that quote is enormously powerful, because IT expresses the idea of self a filling profits.

You know, there is this subjective sense that people have, that our version of the world is the world that we are passively taking in information vertically, this passionately. And in fact, that's not the case. We each construct our own version of the world.

And so for instance, if you think about sync m, right? Our people kind cruel. That's pretty much an unanswerable question at the level of science. It's a philosophical some could, are you even a theological question? But IT turns out that the way you answer that goes a long way in constructing, in shaping the life that you live, the decisions that you make.

So cynics, maybe it's not so much about who they pretend to be, but it's about who they pretend everybody else is, right? If you decide that other people are selfish, for instance, you'll be far less likely to trust p them. And there is a lot of evidence that cynics, when they're put in situations with new people, even when they interact with their friends, romantic partners and families, that they still have their guard up, they're not able to make trusting and deep connections with other people.

But guess what, when you treat other people in that way, a couple of things happen. One, you are not able to receive what most of us need from social connections. There is one really classic and very sad study where people we're forced to give an extemporaneous speech about a subject they don't know much about, a very stressful experience that raised people's blood pressure.

Uh, some of these folks had a cheery leader, not a natural, a cheery leader, but a friendly stranger who was with them while they prepared. You've got this. I know you can do IT.

I'm in your corner. Other people had no support. As you know, one of the great things about social support is that IT buffer ers us from stress. So um most people, when they had this friendly person by their side, their blood pressure as they prepared for the speech, went up only half as much as when they were alone.

But cynical people had a Spike in their blood pressure that was in distinguishable in in magnitude whether or not a person was by their side or not. One way that I think about this is social connection is a deep and necessary form of psychological nourishment. And living a cynical life, making the decision that most people can be trusted stop you from being able to meta lize those calories leaves you mannerism in a social a, in a social way.

A second thing that happens when you choose to pretend that others are selfish, greedy and dishonest is that you bring out the worst in them. There is a lot of research that finds that cynical people tend to do things like monitoring others, spying on them or threatening them to make sure that that other person doesn't betrayed them. But of course, other people can tell how we're treating them, and they reciprocate our kindness and relate against our unk indice. So cynical people end up bringing out the most selfish qualities of others, telling a story full of villains and then ending up stuck living in that story.

How early in life the cynical m show up. I'm thinking about season street characters, which, to me, in body, different neural circuits. You know, you've got cookie monster, some strong dope energia drive there, knows what he wants, knows what he likes.

and he's going to get IT. That great system may be right.

even if you have to eat the in order to get to the cookie quicker, you have elma who's all loving and you have Oscar the grouch, somewhat cynical, but certainly grouch and then in you know essentially every very tale or every Christmas story or um you know there seems to be sort of a skeptic or somebody that can't be brought on board the celebration one would otherwise have.

But even though kids are learning about cynics and grouchiness for margins, I often think about those monotype es in older folks because that's how theyve been written into most of those stories. I guess, Oscar, the goals, we don't know how old Oscar is. If one observes children, how early can you observe classically defined.

cynical m, it's a great classically defined cni. M would be hard to measure very early in life because you typically measure IT through self for poor. So people have to have relatively well developed, elaborated stories that they can tell you about the their version of the world.

That said, one early experience in one early phenotype that's very strongly correlated with generalized mistrust and unwillingness to count on other people would be insecure attachment early in life. So for instance, you might know, but just for listener's, insecure attachment is a way of describing how kids experiences. The social world is often tested using something known as the strange situation where a one year old is brought to a lab with their caregiver, mother, father.

But whoever is caring for them, uh, they're in a novel environment, and the researchers are observing how much do they explore the space, how comfortable do they seem. Then after that are a stranger and to is the room. A couple minutes after that, their mother leaves the room or their caregiver leaves the room, which is, of course, incredibly strange and stressful for most one year old.

The caregiver than returns after a minute IT. And what researchers look at is a few things. One, how comfortable is the child expLoring a space with their caregiver present?

Two, how comfortable are they when other people are around? Three, how do they react when their caregiver leaves and for how do they react at the reunion with their caregivers? And the majority of kids, approximate two thirds of them are security attached, meaning that they are comfortable expLoring a new space. They get really freaked out, of course, as you might when their caregiver leaves, but then they sued quickly when their caregiver returns. The remaining third or so of kids are insecurely attached, meaning that their schedule in new environments, even when they parents or caregivers there, they really freak out when they are caregiver leaves, and they're not very sued upon their return.

Now, for a long time, attachment style was viewed in very emotional terms, and if IT is an emotional reaction, first and foremost, but researchers more recently have started to think about what, what are the cognitive scheme as? What are the underpinnings, the ways that children think when they are securely or insecurely attached, and when brilliant study used looking time? Looking time in kids is a metric of what surprises them.

If something really surprising happens, they look for a very long time. And researchers found the insecurity attached kids when they saw a video of a of a reunion of of a caregiver and and infant acting in a way that felt loving and stable. They looked longer as though that was surprising.

Kids who were securely attached didn't look very long at those stable interactions, but looked longer at interactions that were unstable. Interesting, it's almost as though there is a setup that kids develop very early. Can I count on people? Am I safe with people? And insecure attachment is a signal coming early in life. Now you not safe with people that I think well. And the data show elaborate later in life into mistrust in other relationships.

How different is cynical m from skepticism? You know I can think of some places where they might overlap um but cynical m seems to Carry um something of a lack of anticipation about any possibility of a positive future. Is that one way to think about IT?

That's a very sharp way of thinking about IT actually. And I wish that people knew more about the the discrepancy between these two ways of you in the world since and skepticism, people often use them interchangeably. In fact, they're quite different.

And I would argue that one is much more useful for learning about the world and building relationships than the other. Again, cynical m is a theory that kind of locked in that no matter what people show you, their true colors are again, untrustworthy and self oriented. It's a hybrid Darwinian view, right that that ultimately people are red in tooth in club.

Skepticism is instead uh the um I guess restlessness. Ss ah with our assumptions a desire for new information. One way I often think about IT is that cynics think a little bit like lawyers, right? They have a decision that they've already made about you and about everybody, and they are just waiting for evidence that supports their point.

And when evidence comes in that doesn't support their point, they explain IT away, right? And you see this actually, that cynical people will offer more ulterior motives when they see an active kindness for rent and still explain IT away in that way. I think cynics actually are quite similar to the naive, trusting gallop al folks that they love to make fun of, right? naivety.

Gulbis is trusting people in a credulous, unthinking way. I would say cynical m is mistrusting people in a gradualist and unthinking way. So if if cynics then think like lawyers sort in the prosecution against humanity, skeptics think more like scientists.

Uh, skepticism, classical and philosophy is the belief that you can never truly know anything. But as we think about IT now, it's more a the desire for evidence to underlying any claim that you believe ah and the great thing about skepticism is IT doesn't require an ounce of naivete. You can be absolutely sharp in deciding I don't want to trust this person or I do want to trust this person, but IT allows you to update and learn from specific acts, specific instances and specific people.

When I think about scientists, one of the first things I think about is not just their their willingness, but they're excitement to embrace complexity.

Yes, like, okay, these two groups disagree or um these two sets of data disagree and it's the complexity of that interaction that excites them whether when I think of cynics in the way that is framed up in my mind, which i'm getting more educated now but I I admitted air my my understanding of cynics um is still rather superficial um you'll change that in course of our discussion but that cynics are not embracing the complexity of disagreement. They are moving away from the um certainly any notion of excitement by complexity. IT seems like it's A A hurry tic. It's a way to simplify .

the world around you. That's exactly right. Filled ted lock has a great term for this called integrative complexity. To what extent can you hold different versions of the world, different arguments in mind?

To what extent can you pick from each one what you believe based on the best evidence available? And integrative complexity is a great way to learn about the world and about the social world, where, as cynics, as you rightly point out, is much more of a histed. It's a black and White form of thinking.

And the really sad thing is that cynics then puts us in a position where we can learn very much. This is what in learning theory is called a wicked learning environment. And I don't want to get too nerdy. Well, I guess I can get nerdy here.

Yes, nerdish as you want. This audience likes nerdy.

So I think in asian terms, right? So beijing statistics is where you have a set of beliefs about the world you take new information in. And that new information allows you to update your priors right into a posterior distribution, into a new set of beliefs.

And and that's great. That's a great way to learn about the world to adapt to new information and new circumstances. A wicked learning environment is where your players prevent you from gathering the information that you would need to confirm or just confirm them.

So we think about mistrust, for instance, right? It's easy to understand why people mistrust. Know some of us are insecurely attached.

And we've been heard in the past, were trying to stay safe. We don't want to be betrayed. This is a completely natural response, is a totally understandable response.

But when we decide to mistrust, we never are able to learn whether the people who we are mistrusting would have been trustworthy or not. When we trust, we can learn whether we've been right, not reg, somebody can betray us. And that hurts.

And we remembered for years, or more often than not, the data turn out to show us they can honor that trust. We can build a relationship. We can. We can start a collaboration. We can live a full social life. And IT turns out that the problem is that trusting people incorrectly, you do learn from, but most trusting people incorrectly, you don't learn from because the missed opportunities are invisible to us.

Well, there's certainly a lot there that maps to many people's experience. So you pointed out that some degree of sync m likely has roots in insecure attachment. That said, if one looks internationally, do we find cultures where it's very hard to find cynics um and there could be any number reasons for this or perhaps even more interestingly, uh, do we find cultures where there really isn't even a word for and wow.

I love that question. There is a lot of variance in. And the data on cynics are much more local to the U.

S. typically. I mean, for for for Better and for worth, a lot of research on this is done in an american context. But that said, there's a lot of data on generalized trust, which you could say is an inverse ve cynical m right? So for instance, there are national, international uh, samples of a major surveys which asked people whether they agree or disagree that most people can be trusted.

And there's a lot of variance around the world in general, the cultures that are most trusting have a couple of things in common. One they are more economically equal than interesting cultures. So there's a lot of great work um from uh kate, willa and h Richard wilkinson that they have a book called the spirit level where they look at inequality across the world and related to public health outcomes and one of them is trust.

There is also a various in trust over time so you can look at nutus are their places or cultures that trust more than others but when does the culture trust more or less? And in the us, that's sadly a story of decline. In one nine hundred and seventy two, about half of americans believe that most people can be trusted.

And by twenty eighteen, that had fAllen into about a third of americans. And that's a drop as big. Just put IT in perspective as the stock market took in the financial collapse of two thousand and eight. So so there's a lot of variance here, both across space and time.

And one of the not the only but one of the seeing characteristics of cultures that tracks that is how unequal they are in part because research suggests that when you are in a highly unequal society economically, there is a sense of zero, some competition that develops. There is a sense that wait a minute, anything that another person gets, I lose. And if you have the inherent sense of zero um competition, then it's very difficult to foreign ones.

It's very difficult to trust other people because you might think, well, in order to survive, this person has to try to out run me. They have to try to trick me. They have to try to make me fail for themselves to succeed.

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Supply a vitamin 3k two。 Again, that's drink A G one dot com slash huberman to claim that special offer. What is the relationship, if any, between cynical m and happiness, or lack of happiness?

When I think of somebody who's really cynical, I think of the Oscar, the ground for margin, like character. And as I asked this question, i'm thinking specifically about what you said earlier about, uh, how sync m prevents us from certain form learning that are important, very, very valuable to us. Here's the reason why he was just a little bit of context.

I remember when I was a kid, my dad, who went to classic boarding schools. He grew in south america, but he went to these boarding schools that were very strict. yeah. And he was taught. He told me that to be cheerful and happy, people would accuse you being turned a dumb. Whereas if you were cynical and you act a little bored with everything, yeah, people thought that you were more deciding, yeah, but that he felt that was a terrible model for going through life because IT IT veered into cynical. M, my dad happens to be a scientist.

Yeah, he's, but I think a relatively happy person um sorry dad happy person seems happy but meaning um he is a person who has happiness and as other emotions too I won't say he's happy all the time but he experiences joy and pleasure and deadly active small things, big things in life so clearly he rescued himself from that um the forces that we're kind of pushing him down that path, but that's the animal. But I use that question more as as a way to frame up the possible collaboration between cynical m and and and you know exit board or or a chAllenge and shifting somebody towards a happier effect. Yeah because when I think about cynics, I think that they're like kind of unhappy people.

Yeah and when I think about people who are not very thing, I kd, I think of them is a cheerful and curious. And there's some bibulous there. They might not be tigger like in their um in their effect, but you know they kind of fear that direction.

Ander, I love this trip, don memory lane of having all these childhood memories of tiger and sessions street. There's so much in what you're saying. I want to try to pull on a couple of threats here, if that's okay.

First, and this one is is pretty straightforward, the effective sync m unwell being is just really documented and and quite negative. So there are large studies with tens of thousands of people meet several of these studies that measure cnn's m and then measure life outcomes in the years and decades afterwards. And the news is, is pretty bleak for syntax, right? So IT absolutely lower levels of happiness, flourishing, satisfaction with life, greater incidents of depression, greater loneliness.

But, you know, it's not just the neck up that cnnic effects. Cynics over the course of their lives also attend to have greater degrees of cellular information, a more incidents of heart disease, and they even have higher rates of all cause mortality. So shorter lives then non and x.

And again, this might sound like, wait a minute, you go from a philosophical theory to a shorter life. The answer is, yeah, you do. because. And again, these are correlational studies. So I don't want to draw too many castle claims, but there quite regress and control for a lot of other factors.

But I would say that this is consistent with the idea that really one of the great protectors of our health is our sense of connection to other people. And if you are unable or unwilling to be vulnerable around others to really touch in to that type of connection, IT stands to reason that things like chronic stress and isolation would impact not just your mind, but, you know, all through your your body, in your organ systems. So again, the news here is not great.

And I often think about, you know, one of the best encapsulation of a view of life comes from Thomas hobs, the philosopher who in his book live and said, we need a restrictive government because left to our own devices, human life is nasty, brutish, short. And ironically, I think that might describe the lives, lives of cynics themselves more than most people. So that point one right is that there is this pretty stark negative correlation between cynics and a lot of life outcomes that we might want for ourselves.

But point to, I think, is related to what you dad also noticed, which is that, right? If cynical m hurts us so much, why would we adopt IT? If IT was a peal, there was a pal that as its side effects listed, depression, lonely heart disease and early death, IT would be a poison, right? He would have a skull and crossbones on the bottle.

But yet we're swallowing IT. More of us are swallowing IT than we did in years, in decades past. why? Well, one of the answers is, I think, is because our culture glamr ized cynical.

M is because of the very stereotype that your father pointed out, which is that if you're happy, go lucky. If you trust people, that kind of seems dull IT seems like maybe you don't have that sharp, maybe you don't understand the world. And there is that strong relationship in our stereotypes, in our models of the world.

Suzan fish and many other psychologists have studied warmth and competence, right, how friendly and caring to somebody seem, and how able do they seem to accomplish hard things. And IT turns out that in many studies, people's perception is that these are inversely correlated, that if you're warm, maybe you're not that competent. And if you're competent, maybe you shouldn't be that warm.

And in fact, if you tell people to act as competent tly as they can, they'll often respond by being a little bit less nice, a little bit less warm than they would be otherwise. There's also a data that find that you where people are presented in surveys with a cyc and a non cyc, they're told about here's one person, they really think that people are great overall and they tend to be trusting. Here's another person who thinks that people are kind out for themselves and really doesn't trust most folks.

And they'll ask those people, who should we pick for this difficult intellectual task? Uh, and seventy percent of respondents pick a cynical person over a non cynical for difficult intellectual tasks. Eighty five percent of people think that cynics are socially wier that you'd be able, for instance, to detect who's lying and who's telling the truth. So most of us put a lot of faith in people who don't have a lot of faith in people. Ironically, and even more ironically, we are wrong to do so. August, ever over this great psychologist to studies cynicism, has this paper called the cynical genius illusion, where SHE, uh, documents all these buys, is the way that we think cynics are bright and wise, and then uses national data, tens of thousands of people, to show that actually, cynics do less well on cognitive tests, on mathematic tests, that trust is related with things like intelligence and education and um that in in other work, uh this is not from olga Stever of a, but from others that actually cynics do less well than non cynics s in detecting liars because if you have a blanket assumption about people you're not actually attending to evidence in a sharp way. You're not actually taking in new information and making wise decisions.

In other words, cynics are not being scientific. Their hypothesis is cast, but they're not looking at the data equally. And we should remind people that a hypothetic sis is not a question.

Every great experiment starts with a question. And then you generate a hypothesis, which is A, A, A serious conclusion essentially made up front. And then you go collect data and you see if you prove or disprove the hypothesis yeah and you can never really prove a hypothesis. You can only support IT or not support IT with the data that you collect depending on the precision of your tools.

But that's very interesting because I would think that if we view cyn nics as smarter, which clearly they're not as a group, right? You're saying cynics are not more intelligent, right? You I believe that's covered in in your book and and if one knows that, then you know why do we send cynics in kind of like razors to you to assess what um what the environment is like? Is that because um we'd rather have others um deployed for us to to kind of like weed people out as if that we're willing to um accept some false negatives, meaning um for those that I guess we're using a little bit of a semi technical language, you are false eggs.

Who would be you're trying to assess a group of people, there would be uh terrific employees and you send in somebody interview them that very cynical so presumable in one's mind that filter cynics is only going to allow in people that are really, really right for the job yeah and we're willing to accept that you know there are probably two or three candidates that would also be right for the job. But we're willing to let them go some false some false negatives as opposed to having someone get through the filter who really can't do the job. But we're willing to let certain opportunities go by being cynical or by deploying a cynical as the i'm imagine the person with the clipboard you know um very rigid yeah like cynical m and rigidity seem to go together. So that's why I am lumping these kind of psychological finot. Pes.

no, I I think that's absolutely right. And so a couple of things. One, you know, you said that if we know that cynics aren't smarter than none and it's why we deploying them, well, let's be clear. We know this, meaning you, you and I know this, and scientists know this. But the data show that most people don't know this, that we maintain the stereotype in our culture that being negative about people means that you've been around the block enough times that he is a form of wisdom. So that's the stereotypes that I think we need to dispell, first of all.

But I do think that to your pots, when we deploy cynics out in the field, you know, when we say, i'm going to be nice, but I want somebody who's really pretty negative, who's really pretty suspicious to protect me or to protect my community, I think that's a really, again, understandable instinct, almost from an evolutionary perspective. You know, we are built to pay lot of attention to threats in our environment and threats to our community and in the early social world. And if you wind just to do some back of the envelope evolutionary psychology, if you wind the clock back one hundred, one hundred, fifty thousand years, what's, you know, what is the greatest threat to early communities? It's it's people, right? It's people who would take advantage of our communal nature.

The thing that allows human beings to thrive is that we collaborate um but that collaboration means that a free writer, somebody who chooses to not pitch in but still take out from the common pool anything that they want can do exceptionally well. They can live a life of leisure on the backs of a community that's working hard. And if if you select them for that type of person, if that type of person proliferates and the community collapses.

So IT makes sense that we uh depend on cynics from that perspective, from a threat mitigation perspective, from a risk aversion perspective. But IT doesn't make sense from the perspectives of trying to optimize our actual social lives, right? And I think that often times we are risk of in general, meaning that we are more a scared of negative outcomes than we are enticed by positive outcomes. But in the social world, that risk aversion is I I think, quite harmful in a lot of demonstrated ways.

Is cynical m domain specific. And they're going on using jargon, meaning if somebody is cynical in one environment, like cynical about the markets, like, well, things are up now, you know, have an election comes to school this way is that way depending, you know, do they tend to be cynical about other aspects of life, other domains.

So there's a little bit of data on this, and he suggests a couple of things. One left to our own devices. Our levels of cynics tend to be pretty stable over time and also decline in older adult bt hood contract, the stereo pe of the carmagnola older person.

But another is that cynical m does tend to be pretty domain general. So for instance, cynics, uh, you know people and this makes sense if you look at questionnaire assessing ISIS m, which are things like people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught or most people really don't like helping each other. I mean, you're answering those questions positively.

You're just not a fan of you. Probably not greater parties know you're not a fan of people. And IT turns out that people who answer, though, this is an old scale developed by a couple of psychologist named walter cook and Donald medley in the thousand nine hundred fifties, if you answer the cook medley hostility scale, if you ask these questions positively, you tend to be less trusting of strangers.

But you also attend to, for instance, have less trust in your romantic partnerships, you have less trust in your friends, and you have less trust in your colleagues. So this is sort of an all purpose view of the world, at least as cook in medley. First, I first thought about IT.

But I do wanna build on a great intuition you have, which is that different environments might bring out cynical m or tempered down and IT. Turns out that that's also very true as street like a cynisca be. There's lot of evidence that the type of social environment where in matters a lot, one of my favorite studies in this domain um came from uh, southeastern brazil.

There are two fishing villages in southeastern brazil. They're separated by about thirty, forty miles. They're similar. And so economic status, religion, culture, but there's one big difference between them.

One of the villages sits on the ocean, and in order to fish on the ocean, you need big boats, heavy equipment. You can't do IT alone. You must work together.

The other village is on a lake where Fishermen strike out on small boats alone, and they compete with one another. About ten years ago, economists, this was a study LED by Andrea's libra, a really great economist. The, they went to these villages, and they gave the folks who work there a bunch of social games to play. These were not with fellow Fishermen, but with strangers.

Games like, would you trust somebody with some money and see if they then want to share dividends with you or giving some money yourself? Would you like to share some of IT with another person? And they found that when they start in their careers, lake Fishermen and ocean Fishermen were equally trusting and equally trustworthy as well.

But over the course of their careers, they diverged. Being in a collaboration environment where people must count on one another to survive made people over time more trusting and more trustworthy. Being in a competitive zero sum environment over time make people less trusting and less trustworthy.

Now one thing that always amazes me about this work is that people in both of these environments are rights. If you're in a competitive environment, you don't trust and you're right in that trust. If you're in a collaborative environment, you do trust and you're right to trust.

And this is from the point of view of economic games, and I think much broadly construed as well. So one question then becomes, well, which of these environments do we want to be in, right? I think the in terms of well being and relationships is quite obviously, you're in a competitive environment. And the the second question, of course, is how do we put ourselves in the type of environment that we want, knowing that that environment will change who we are over the course of our lives.

So much of schooling in this country is based on, at first, CoOperation, like all going to sit around and listen to a story, and then we're going to work in small groups. But in my experience, over time, IT evolves into more independent learning and competition. They post the distribution of scores that largely uh, the distribution of individual scores. There are exceptions to this, of course, like I think i've never been to business school, but I think they form small groups and work on projects is true computer science at the undergraduate level and so on.

But to what extent do you think having a mixture of co Operative learning, still competition perhaps between groups as well as individual learning in competition can Foster um kind of an erosion of cynical m because that sounds like being cynical is I don't want to be hard on the cynics here but um they're probably already hard on themselves and everybody else we know they're hard on everybody else but uh there there was my presumption. Okay, i'm gonna open minded. Maybe they're not you'll tell me um that you know that they are on average less intelligent is what i'm hearing that um and that there's a something really big to be gained from anybody who decides to embrace novel ideas even if they decided stick with the original decision about others or something he had provided.

They explore the data in an open minded way even transiently IT sounds like there's an opportunity there. You gave a long term example of these two fishing scenarios. Um so the neural plasticity takes you know years but we know neural plastics can be pretty quick. Would imagine if you expose a sync to a um to counter example to their belief that it's not going to road all of their cynisca IT might make a little dent in that neural circuit for cynical .

m yeah this is A A great perspective. And you know, couple of things I want to be clear on. One I not here to judge, or in pune cynics, I should confess that I myself struggle with cynical m and have for my entire life, part of my journey to learn more about IT and even to write this book was an attempt to understand myself and to see if that is possible to unlearn cynics, because, Frankly, I wanted to.

So you will get no judgment from me of people who feel like it's hard to trust I. I think that another point that you're bring out that I want a cosine is that saying that competition over the long term, zero, some competition can I wrote our trust isn't the same as saying that we should never compete. Competition is beautiful.

I mean, it's the olympics are going on right now, and it's amazing to see what people do when they are at odds, trying to best one another. Incredible feats are accomplished when we focus on the great things that we can do. And often times we are driven to greatness by people we respect who are trying to be greater than us.

So absolutely, competition can be part of a very healthy social structure in a very healthy life. I think that the broader question is whether we can grow that competition at the level of a task or at the level of the person. I in fact, there's a lot of work in the science of conflict and conflict resolution that looks at the difference between task conflict and personal conflict.

You can imagine in a workplace, two people have different ideas for they want for what direction they want to take a project in. Well, that's great if IT leads to healthy debate and if that is mutually respectful. But the minute that that turns into blanket judgements about the other person, or the reason that they want this direction is because they're not so bright, or because they don't have vision, or because they're trying to gain favorite, that's when we go from healthy, skeptical conflict into cynical and destructive conflict.

And you see this with athletes as well. Athletes often are very good friends. And some of the people they respect the most are the folks who they are battling, in the case of of of of contact sports and boxing, literally battling, but they can have immense and positive regard for one another outside of the ring in those contests. So I think that there is a huge difference between competition that's oriented on tasks which can help us be the best version of ourselves, and competition that blades into judgment, suspicion and mistrust.

I'd like to take us back just briefly to these developmental stages. Maybe i'm bridget, two things that don't belong together, but i'm thinking about the Young brain, which of courses hyper plastic in comparing that to the older brain. But the Young brain learns a number of things while IT does a number of things that handles heart rate, digestion IT said a unconciously.

And then in many ways, the neuroplasticity that occurs early in life is to establish these maps of prediction. You know, if you know, things fall down, not up in general, yeah, things fall down, not up, and so on, so that mental, realistic can be used for other things and learning new things. So i'm thinking about the classic example of object permanence.

You show a baby um you know a blocker, a toy and then you hide that toy and they at a certain age of Young age will look as if it's gone and then you bring IT back and then they're amazed. And then at some point along their developmental trajectory, they learn object permanence. They know that it's behind your back, okay? And then um we hear that characters like santa claws are real.

And then eventually we learn that they're not and so on and so on. In many ways, we go from being completely non cynical about the physical world to being um one could to review a cynical about the physical world, right like i'd love to see magic. In fact we had probably the world's best or among the very best magicians uh on this podcast.

As he wind, he's a mentalist and magician and to see him do magic, even as an adult who understands that the laws of physics supply, they seem to defy the laws of physics in in real time. And I just blows your mind. So the point where you like that can be but you sort of wanted to be in someone, you just go, you know it's what we call magic.

So IT seems to me that cynics apply almost physics like rules to social interaction like that. Um they talk in terms of like first principles of human interactions, right they talk about um this group always this and that group always that right is like strict categories, thick black lines between and between categories as opposed to and he kind of blending of of understanding or blending of rules. And one can see how that would be a really useful heroic. But as we're learning, its its not good in the sense that we don't want to judge, but it's not good if our goal is to learn more about the world or learn the most information about the world.

Can we say yes, I I appreciate you think yeah I, I, I also try to avoid good, bad language or moral judged, but I think that many of us have the goals of having strong relationships and of of flourishing psychologically and of learning accurately about the world. And if those are your goals, I think it's fair to say that cynical m can block your ways, words, them. I love this.

I've never thought about IT in this way, but I I love that perspective. And there is almost a philosophical certainty. Maybe it's not a happy philosophical certainty, but we love to human beings, love explantatory power.

We love to be able to have laws that determine what will happen. And the laws of physics are some of our most reliable right? And really, we all use theories to predict the world. Mean, we all have a theory of gravity that lives inside our head.

We don't think objects with mass attracted one another, but we know if we drop a bowlin ball on our foot, we're going to probably maybe not walk for the next week, at least straight. So so we use theories to provide explantatory simplicity to a vast in overwhelmingly complex world and absolutely, I think cynical m has a great function in simplifying. But of course, in simplifying, we lose a lot of the detail.

We lose a lot of the wonder that maybe we experienced, uh, earlier in life. And you know, I do want to your beautiful description of kids in their sort of sense of, I suppose, perennial surprise makes me think about another aspect of what we lose to cynical m, which is the ability to witness the beauty of human action and human kindness. My friend, darker keller studies are this emotion of experiencing something vast and and also experiencing ourselves as small and a part of that vast ness.

And he read a great book on and in IT, he talks about his research, where he catalogued what are the experiences that most commonly produce, all in a large sample, large represented sample, of people. Now I don't know about you, Andrew, but when I think about my first that go to its carl sagan pale blue dot, this image of kind of nebula band cluster, basically stardust really. And there's one dot in IT with an arrow and and carl sagan's, that dad is earth and every king and tired and mother and father, every person who's ever fAllen in love and every person is ever at, they're harper, and they're all on that tiny dot there I go to that, show that to my kids all the time.

When I think of, I think of outer space, I think of groves of redwood trees, I think of drone footage of the him, alas, right? But decree fines that if you ask people what they experience are in response to the number one category is what he calls moral beauty. Everyday acts of kindness, giving, compassion and connection is also related to what darker and john hate talk about in terms of moral elevation, witnessing positive actions that actually make us feel like we're capable of more.

And moral beauty is everywhere. If you are open to IT, IT is the most common thing that will make you feel the vastness of our species. And to have a lawful physics like prediction about the world that blinkers you from seeing that that that, that gives you tunnel vision and prevents you from experiencing moral beauty seems like a tragic form of simplicity.

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I love that your examples of both pale blue dot and everyday compassion, a bridge, the two, what I think of is tim domains that the, or I should say, space timed domains that the brain can encompass. This has long fascinated me about the human brain and present ably other animals brains as well which is that you know we can sharpen our um appeared to you know something so so small and pay attention to just like the the immense beauty and like I have a lot of ants in my yard right now and lately I ve been watching them interact because they were driving me crazy. They were just like, you know they were like everywhere this summer and they climbing on me.

I think I just come like watch what they do and clearly there's a structure there I know um Debra gorden stanford as study behavior and others and it's like there's a lot going on there, but then you look up from them like, well, there's a big yard. And then the sense of all for me is that interactions like that must be going on everywhere in this in this yard and IT frames up, that the appetite of our cognition, an in space and in time, covering small distances quickly, small distance slowly. And then then we can zoom out, literally, and think about us on this.

Ball and space right you know and um and that ability I think is is incredible and that all can be captured at these different extremes of space, time, cognition amazing IT seems to me what you're saying is that cynicism and are also at opposite ends of the continuum and that taking us in the direction slightly different than I was going to try and take us. But I I love that we're talking about oh because to me IT feels like it's a more extreme example of delight and i'd like you to um perhaps if there's any examples of research on this touch on to what extent a sense of cynical m divorcees us from delight and or uh I guess their collaborator which is creativity. To me everything you're saying about cynicism makes IT sound anti creative because you're by definition you're eliminating possibility and creativity of course, the unique uh original combination of existing things or the creation of new things altogether creativity yeah um so what if anything has been studied about the relationship between cynical M I guess we call IT open mindless and a creativity and or all yeah.

great questions. And there is some work on this. And a lot of IT comes actually in the context of the workplace, right? So you can examine, I mean, these brazilian fishing villages were, after all, workplaces, right, that LED people to more or less cynical.

M, but other workplaces also have structures that make people more, less able to trust one another. One version of this is what's known as stack ranking. And you know, this is where people managers are forced to pick the highest performing and lowest performing members of their team, and in essence, eliminate the people who are at the bottom ten percent every six or twelve months.

Stack ranking king has thankfully mostly fAllen out of favor in in the corporate world. But I was very derider in the late twenty th and early twenty first century, you know, up until ten or so years ago. And IT still exists in some places.

And the idea again was, if you want people to be creative, if you want them to do their best, tap into who they really are and who are we really? We are really a hyper individualism. Again, Darwinian species is really stack ranking, is a social Darwinist approach to management.

And the ideas, well, great. If you threaten people, if you make them want to defeat one another, they will be at their most creative when they are trying to do that, right, that they will bring out their best. The opposite is true.

I mean, stack ranked workplaces, of course, are miserable. The people in them are quite unhappy and more likely to leave their jobs. But some of the more interesting work pretends to what stack ranking does, the creativity.

Because IT turns out that if your job is to just not be at the bottom of the pile, then the last thing you want to do is take a creative risk. You do not want to go out on a limb. You do not want to try something new if other people are going to go after you for doing that.

And if you screw up or if IT doesn't go well, you're eliminated from the group, right? So so I think you're exactly right that these cynical environments are also highly conservative. I have critics not mean politically conservative, I mean conservative in terms of the types of choices that people make.

And it's sort of, I think, at the level of individual creativity. But there is also a cost at the level of what we might call group creativity, right? A lot of our best ideas come not from our minds, but from the space between us, from dialogue or from group conversation.

And IT turns out that in stack drank zero. Some environments, people are less willing to share knowledge and perspective because doing so amounts to helping your enemy succeed, which is the same as helping yourself fail. So to the extent that creativity requires uh a sort of collaborative mindset than cynics, is is is is preventative of that.

And there's actually some terrific work um um by by a idle Willy and colleagues that looks at group intelligence, collective intelligence. This is the idea that of course, people have levels of intelligence that can be measured in vigorous ways and have various forms of intelligence as well. But groups, when they get together, have a type of intelligence and IT, especially creative problem solving intelligence, that goes above and beyond the some of their parts that can't be explained.

And actually, in some cases, is almost orthogonal to the intelligence of the individuals in that group, right? Controlling for the intelligence of individuals, there is a group factor that still matters. And so I need to Willy and others have looked at, well, what predicts that type of collective intelligence and a couple of factors matter. One is people, uh, people's ability to understand each other, other's emotions, so interpersonal sensitivity, but another is their willingness to, in essence, pass the mike to share the conversation and to collaborate. And so again, succeeding, thriving, optimizing and being creative, both at the individual and at the group level, require environments where we feel free and where we feel safe and where we feel that contributing to somebody else can also contribute to ourselves.

It's so interesting to think about all of this in the context of neuroplasticity. I I feel like one of the holy grills of neuroscience is to finally understand what are the gates to neuroplasticity. We understand a lot about the cellular mechanisms. We know it's possible throughout the lifespan. We know that there is sure an involved of different new modulators and and so on.

But um at the level of kind of human behavior and emotional stance, not technical not a technical term but i'll use IT of say being curious to me, curiosity is an interest in the outcome with no specific emotional attachment to the outcome. But of course, we could say you're curious with the hope of getting a certain result, know that one could modify IT. But there is something about that child like mind, so called beginner's mind, where you're open to different outcomes and seems like examples that you're giving.

Keep bring me back to these developmental themes because if it's true that cynics know exclude a lot of data that could be useful to them, IT seems that the opportunities for neural plasticity are reduced for cynics to flip IT on its head. To what extent are we all a little bit cynical? And how would we explore that like if if I were in your laboratory and you had ten minutes with me and what questions would you ask me um to determine how cynical I might be or how um not cynical I might be well the first thing that .

I would do is give you that classic questionaire from cooking medley, which would just ask you about your theories of the world. What do you think people are like? Do you think that people are generally honest? Do you think that they are generally trustworthy?

So IT loads the questions or it's open ended where I would would you say what are people like? And then I would just kind free associated about .

that is a series of fifty statements. And you asked in a binary way, do you agree or disagree with each of these statements? Since then, August ever ova and others have adapted cook medical and made IT a shorter scale and turn the questions into continuous one to nine or one to seven answers um but generally speaking, these are discrete questions numerically or quantitative timely tap our general theory of people.

If you were in my lab, I might also ask you to play some different economic games, you know, the trust game being the number one that we might use here, so I can explain IT. So the trust game involves two players, uh, and one of them is an investor. They start out with some amount of money, less to, say, ten dollars, they can send as much of that money as they want to a trusty.

The money is then tripled in value. So if the investor sends ten dollars, the in the hands of the trustee IT becomes thirty dollars. The trustee can then choose to give back whatever amount they want to the investor, so they can be exactly fair and give fifteen back, in which case both people end up pretty much Better off than they would have without an active trust.

The trusty can keep all thirty dollars themselves betraying the investor, or the trusty can give more than fifty percent. I think, think, well, I started out with nothing. Why did you take two thirds back? And this is one terrific behavioral measure of trust.

And IT can be played in a couple of different ways. One is binary, where I would say, Andrew, do you, you can send ten dollars to an into next stranger, or you can send nothing, and they can choose to send you back half, or they can choose to send you back nothing. Would you do IT? Actually, what i'm curious.

would you do that? Oh, I absolutely zien over to them. I'm curious.

great. You and I am willing to lose the money. So I supose that factors in this one.

yeah. Follow up question, in that type of study, what percentage of trust is do you think make the trustworthy decision of sending .

back the money? 可是。 Fifty five .

percent yeah so your prediction there is quite aligned with most peoples um there is a great study by fashion hour and dunning um that found that people when they are asked to forecast, they say I bet fifty two, fifty five percent of people will send this money back, will make this binary trust decision in fact, eighty percent of trust dies make the pro social and trustworthy decision.

And again, what fashion hour and turning found is that negative assumptions were less likely to send over the money and therefore less likely to learn that we were wrong. right? And so that's one of it's another example of where cynical beliefs, I mean, you're interesting because you have the belief that a fifty percent chance, but you still chose to trust, right?

So from a asian perspective, when that person actually sent the money back, which they would have an eighty percent chance of doing, and if I were to ask you again, what percentage of people give back, you might update your perception absolutely right um but without any evidence you can update your perception. So and this is just one of many examples. IT turns out that there's a lot of evidence that when asked to estimate how friendly, trustworthy, compassionate or open minded others are, people's estimates come in much lower than data suggest.

And this, to me, is both the tragedy of cynical thinking, those hissings that we're using an a major opportunity for so many of us, right, is a tragedy because we're coming up with these simple black and White physics likes predictions about the world and they're often wrong. They're often unduly negative an opportunity because to the extent that we can tap into a more scientific or curious mindset, to the extent that we can open ourselves to the data, pleasant surprises are everywhere. The social world is full of a lot more positive and helpful and kind people.

Then we realized, right, the average person underestimate tes. The average person. This is not to say that there aren't awful, are people who do awful things every day around the world.

There, of course are. But we take those extreme examples and over rotate on them. We assume that the most toxic, awful examples that we see, our representative, when they're not. So we miss all these opportunities, but in that, I hope, opens people to a to to gaining more of those opportunities, to using them and to finding out more accurate and more hopeful information about each other.

There does seem to be a silence about a negative interactions, or somebody stealing from us, or doing something that we consider cruel to answer to others. Nowadays, with social media, we get a window into cash, probably billions of social interactions in the form of comments and cat bags and retweets. And there certainly has been evidence on social media.

But what, if any data exists about um how social media either feds uh or impedes cynicism or maybe doesn't change IT at all? Um and I should say that there's also the kind of um to be careful trying not to be cynical, I maintained the the view that certain social media platforms encourage a bit more negativity than others and certainly there are accounts i'm trying to think like accounts like an initial like up worthy which is whole basis is to you promote positive stuff. I like that account very much but certainly you can find the full array of emotions on social media and to what extent is just being on social media regardless of platform increasing or decreasing? Cynical m is a .

terrific question um it's hard to provide a very clear answer and I don't want to get out over my skies with what is known and what's not known. Social media has been a tec tonic shift in our lives IT has coincided with a rise and cynisca but as you know, history is not an experiment so you can't take two temporal trends that are a coincident with one another and say that one caused the other.

That said, my own intuition and a lot of the data suggest that in at least some ways, social media is a cynical m factory. right? I mean, so so let's first stipulate how much time we're spending on there.

I mean, the average person, uh, goes through three hundred feet of social media feed a day. Is that right? Yeah they've measured .

IT in feet approximately .

the height of the statue of liberty. Yeah so we're we're doing one statue of liberty of scrolling a day much of IT doom scrolling if fear anything like me at least um and so then the question becomes, what are we seeing when we scroll for that long? Who are we seeing and are they representative of what people are really like? And the answer in a lot of ways is no that what we see on social media is not representative of the human population.

So there's a lot of evidence, a lot of this comes from from William am ready now at in northwestern and Molly croit, that when people tweet, for instance, I mean, this is a lot of this is done on the site form, really known as twitter, when people tweet in outrage and when they tweet negatively, and when they tweet about, in particular, immorality, right, moral outrage that algorithms ally, those tweet are broadcast further. They're shared. Mom, and this doors a couple of things.

One IT reinforces the people who are already tweet in that way. So William bratty has this great work using a kind of reinforcement learning model, right? Reinforcement learning is where you do something, you're rewarded, and that reward makes you more likely to do that same thing again.

And IT turns out that a, that brady found that when people tweet in outrage and then get egg done, and often times, I should say, this is tribal in nature at somebody tweet against somebody who's an outsider and then being rewarded by people who they considered to be part of their group, right? When that happens, that person is more likely in their future tweet to turn up the volume on that outrage and on that moral outrage in particular. So there is a sort of racket effect right on the people who are sharing.

But the second question becomes, well, what about the people watching? What about the rest of us? Clear Robertson has a great paper on this where SHE documents that a vast majority, I mean ninety plus percent of tweet are created by the ten percent of the most active users, right? And this is in the political sphere, and these are probably not representative these folks not representative of the rest of us in terms of how extreme ah and maybe how how bitter their opinions are.

And so we when we're scrolling that statue of liberty y's worth of information, we think that we're seeing the world. We think that we're seeing our fellow citizens. We think that we're getting a picture of what people are like.

In fact, we're pulling from the fringes. And what this leads to is a misconstrue of what the world is really like. This is, by the way, not just part of social media, is also part of legacy media.

Communication theorists talk about something called the mean world syndrome, right? Where the more time that you spend looking at the news, for instance, the more you think violent crime is up in your area, the more you think you're in danger of violent crime, even during years when violent crime is decreasing. I'm old enough to remember when stranger danger was this big, uh, massive story.

In every time you wanted cereal, the milk carton would have a picture of a kid would been kidnapped by a stranger. And during that time, if you ask people how many kids are being kidnapped by strangers in the us, they would in many case say fifty thousand children are being kidnapped each year in the U. S. fifty.

Can you imagine what the world be? There would be swat teams on every corner. The real number in those years was closer to one hundred kids per year.

Now let me be clear. Each one of those is an absolute tragedy. But there is a big difference here. And often times when we tend into media, we end up with these enormously warped perceptions where we think that the world is much more dangerous than IT really is. We think that people are much more extreme than they really are.

And because stories of immorality go viral so much more often than stories of everyday goodness, I mean, I love up worthy as well, but it's not winning right now in the, in the, in the social media war. Not yet, not. And so this leaves us all absolutely exhausted and also feeling alone.

People who feel like, wow, I actually don't feel that much outrage. I don't want to feel that much outrage. I actually don't want to hate everybody who is different from me. For instance, i'm just exhausted by all this. We feel like, well, I guess i'm the only one because everybody else seems really excited about this battle royal that we've put ourselves in. But in fact, most people are just like the exhausted majority, right? We're paying so much attention to a to a tiny minority of what the journalist demanded, a ripply calls conflict entrepreneurs, people who stoke conflict on purpose, that we're confusing them with the average.

oh, so much there. I I was suppose a mixed relationship to social media. I teach there and I learned there and I also have to be very discerning ing terms of how I interact with IT.

And um you made this point that i've never heard anyone make before um which is that many people feel alone by virtue of the fact that they don't share in this worrying nature um that they see on social media almost like sometimes do I feel like i'm watching a combat sport that I don't feel quite cut out for you and then when i'm away from IT, I feel Better but I like everybody else sometimes you don't get sucked into the you know highly sale nature of of a combat between between groups on social mediates it's um can be very Loring um in the worst way yeah um this mean world syndrome what's the inverse of that kind world under my suppose but attempt at creating those sorts of social media platforms. I have been made things like blue sky, which has other aspects to IT as well. But and while IT may be thriving, I don't know, I haven't checked recently IT seems like people aren't really interested in being on there as much as they are these other platforms. Clearly, the numbers play out that way. Why do you think that is?

Well, we as a species, I think, are characterised by what we would call negativity, bias, right? Negative events and threats loom larger in our minds. And that IT happens in a number of domains.

Our decision making is negatively bias and that we d prefer to avoid a negative outcome than to pursue a positive outcome. That's a classic works of economy into versy, for instance. Uh, the impressions that we form are often negatively skilled.

So classic works and psychology going back to the thousand nine hundred fifties shows that if you, if you teach somebody about a new person who they they ve never met and you list three positive qualities that this person has. And three, negative qualities. People will very much judge the person on their worst qualities, and also remember more about their negative qualities than about their positive qualities. And again, you can see why this would be part of who we are, because we need to protect one another. We also attempted, by the way nature think in a negatively biased way, but speak and share in a negatively biased way.

In my lab we had a study where people witnessed other groups of four playing an economic game where they could be selfish or they could be um or or they could be positive and we asked them, okay, we're going to ask you to share a piece of information about one of the people you were playing this game with for a future generation of participants, who would you like to share about and when somebody in a group acted in a selfish way, they, the people shared information about them three times more often than when they acted in a generous way. So we gossip negatively. And again, that gossip is pro social.

The idea is if there is somebody out there harming my community, of course i'm going to shout about them from the rooftops because I want to protect my friends. It's a very noble in a way. But we further found that when we actually showed a new generation of participants, the gossip that the first generation shared, and we asked, hey, how generous and how selfish were people in that first generation? They vastly underestimated that group's generosity.

Does that makes sense? In other words, in trying to protect our communities, we send highly biased information about who's in our community and give other people the wrong idea of who we are. And I see that unfolding on social media every day my life, every day that i'm on social media.

I do try to take breaks, but when i'm on there, I see IT. And to your question, you know, what do we do here? You know, why don't positive networks, positive information? Why isn't IT proferred more, I think is because of these ingrained biases in our mind.

And I understand that can sound fatalistic because it's like, oh, maybe this is just who we are, but I don't think that we generally accept our instincts and biases as as a life sentence, as as as as destiny. A lot of us, well, human beings in general, have the instinct to trust and be kinder towards people who look like us versus people who don't. For instance, we share our racial makeup.

None of us, I think few of us, see here and say, well, I have that biased in my mind. So I guess i'm always going to be racially biased. We try to counteract those instincts.

We try to become aware of those biases. Depressed people have the bias to see themselves as worthless and to interpret new information they receive through that framework. Well, therapy is the attempt to say, I don't want to feel this way anymore.

I want to fight the defauts settings in my mind. I want to try to explore a curiosity, to explore something new. So to say that this toxic environment that we're in corresponds with some of our biases is, to me, not the same as saying we are destined to remain in that situation.

Do you think it's possible to be adequately informed about threats, to be able to live one's life in the most adaptive way? Um well, not being on social media. No, none of the social media platforms can you have a great life that way, a safe life. This is a .

quiz I philosophical question. But from my perspective, absolutely I think some of the threats that we learn about on social media are simply wrong. Their phantom threats, they we're made to fear something that actually is not happening, made to fear a group of people who are not as dangerous as they're made out to be on social media.

Of course, I think being informed about the world around us matters to staying safe. But again, I think we can also more broadly construe what safety is of being on social media makes you avoided of taking chances on people. If IT makes you feel as though anybody who's different from you ideologically, for instance, is blood thirsty and extreme, that's going to limit your life in very important ways.

And you can talk about being safe in terms of safe from acute threats. But as we've talked about, living a diminished and disconnected life is its own form of danger over a longer time horizon. So really, you know, there is a lot, there are a lot of ways in which in, in, in the attempt to stay safe right now, we introduce ourselves to long term danger. I'm not anti .

social media, but I have to circle bacco in this yet again former guest on this podcast, one of our most popular episodes with a former navy seal, David gargan, whose known for many things, but chief among them is striving and pushing oneself.

And David said many times that nowadays it's easier than ever to be extraordinary because most people are basically spending time just consuming experiences on social media and doing a lot less, just literally doing a lot less, not just exercising and running as he does all by the way, he's in school to become a paramedic. So he essentially gone a medical school and is always doing lunch of other things is as well. So um he's also an intellectual learner.

Now I don't know if I agree with him completely, but it's an interesting statement. You know, if social media is bringing out our sync m polarizing us and perhaps taking away, I would probably agree with David, at least to some extent, taking away our time where we could be generated writing, thinking, socializing, building in other ways that one builds their life. Then guess an important question is, do you think social media could be leveraged to decreased cynical m, or as you refer to IT, to generate hopeful skepticism? Like this notion of hopeful skepticism as a replacement for cynicism is something that is really intriguing. Like, what would that look like? We were just to do get an experiment here, like what would have feed on social media look like that, that hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynisca this.

here's a far out exam. I think I love this train of thought. I'm going to try to take IT to a logical conclusion that would never actually occur in real life. But but a great way to generate more accurate and hopeful skep purism. And by hopeful skepticism, I mean skepticism, as we've described, a scientific mindset, a scientific perspective in a curiosity, hunger for information and then the hopeful peace.

I simply mean a skepticism that begins with the understanding that our defaults are are often too negative so that i'm going to be open and i'm going to realize that my gut instinct is probably leading me towards the negative and can be chAllenged that I don't have to listen to IT all the time. So just that as a working definition. And I think that what I would want in a social media feed would be for you to have more data if you could compel every person on earth to post to to social media about what they're doing today, about what they are thinking, about what they want, about their values, right? If you could compel each.

Of course, that's this topic in many ways, but just as a thought experiment, and then people's feed was a representative sample of real people on the planet, right? Real people and and people who, over time, as I scroll through my statue of liberty now, I see what people are really like. I see the people are extreme and negative and toxic but I also see a grandmother whose driving a grandkids to hockey practice um I see a nurse who's coming in to help an elderly patient and I see somebody who's made an unlikely connection with somebody who they disagree with a veridical accurate feed I think would drive hopeful skettles ism and that's again, one of the things that has struck me most over the last few years of doing this research is that we stereotype hope and positivity as as you are saying earlier, as kind of dim, naive.

A rose colored pair of glasses. But in fact, I think what the data show is, is that we're all wearing a pair of suit. Color glass is all the time. And actually, the best way to make people more hopeful is to ask them to look more carefully, not to look away, but look towards in a more accurate and open fashion. And there's one version of this that we've tried at stanford in our own backyard.

So my lab and I leave for years been serving um as many stanford undergraduates as we can about their social health, right? So how connected are they? How mentally healthy are they? Um and a couple years ago, we asked the thousands of undergraduates to describe both themselves and the average stanford student on a number of dimensions.

For instance, how eatee are you? How eatee is the average strain for student? How much do you like helping people who are struggling? What do you think the average stand for student would respond to that? How much do you want to meet new people on campus? How do you think the average student would respond? And we discovered not one, but two stanfords.

The first was made up of real students who are enormously compassionate, who really want to meet new friends, who want to help their friends when they are struggling. The second stanford existed in students minds. Their imagination of the average undergraduate was much less friendly, much less compassionate, much prick, liar and more judgmental than real students were.

So again, we've got this discrepancy between what people perceive and social reality. We found that students who underestimated their appeals were less willing to do things like strike up a conversation with a stranger or confide in a friend when they were struggling. And that left them more isolated in loan ear.

This is the kind of vicious cycle of cynicism, right? But more recently, my lab LED by a great postdoc, ray pay, uh, tried an intervention. And the intervention was as simple as you can imagine. IT was show students the real data. We put posters in a number of dorms, experimental dorms.

We called them that, simply said, hey, did you know ninety five percent of students at stanford would like to help their friends who are struggling? Eighty five percent want to make friends with new students. We also worked with frosh one a, one a one unit class that most first year students take and show them the data we're just showing students to each other.

And we found that when students learn this information, they were more willing to take social risks. And six months later, they were more likely to have a greater number of friends to be more socially integrated. So here again is a tragic and vicious cycle.

And within, there's a virtuous cycle that can replace IT. If we just show people Better information, you know, again, I don't imagine that they'll never be a social media feed where everybody has to post and you see an actually representative sample of the world. But if we could, I do think that, that would generate a more hopeful perspective because the truth is more hopeful than what we're seeing.

You think there is a version of A I that is less cynical than people tend to be. The reason I ask this is i'm quite excited about and hopeful about. Hey, I am not one of these. I don't know what you d call them.

but A I mor s and it's here.

it's happening. It's happening in the background now. And i've started using A I in a number of different realms of life, and I find to be incredible. Um IT seems to me to combine neural networks in google search with pub mad and and is fascinating. It's not perfect.

It's far from perfect, right? But that's also part of its beauty, is that IT myrick human lack of perfect is a well enough that IT IT feels something kind of like brain, like personality. Like you could imagine that a given the enormous amount of cynics that out there that some of the large language models that make up A I um would be somewhat cynical, would put filters that were overly stringent on certain topics.

You also wouldn't want a eye that was not stringent enough. Yeah right because we are already and soon to be uh using a eye to bring us information extremely quickly. In the last thing we want our errors in that information.

So um if we were to take what we know from humans and the data that you've collected and others have collected about ways to shift ourselves from cynicism to hopeful scepticism, do you think that something that could be placed into these large language models are not talking about at the technical level of be certainly beyond my my understanding. But could you build an AI version of yourself that could forage the internet for news and what's going on out there? That is, you. It's tune down the the system a little bit, since it's difficult to be less cynical. In other words, could IT do a Better job of being you than you, and then therefore make you Better?

Wow, I love that question. I think that there is, I could imagine an opportunity for that. I think one one road black that I don't think is instrumental, but that you would need to face in that really fascinating goal is that AI models are, of course, products of the data that we feed them. And so if you know basically AI models eat the internet right, swallow IT and then give IT back to us in some form to the extent of the internet is uh asem tricity waiting right is over waiting, negative content um and cynical content then a that swallow that will reflect IT as well. I think that and I could imagine it's it's blowing my mind in real time to think about, but you could imagine retuning the way that A I takes information to account for negativity bus and to correct fraction.

This is what you're getting that I think right to correct for that negativity bias and then produce an inference that is less biased, more accurate and less cynical and then give that as a kind of digest to people right? So don't make me go through uh, my social media feed, go through IT for me correct right d bias IT uh and then and then and then give IT to me uh in a more accurate way. That's an incredible idea.

That's what I want. Um I was thinking about my instagram feed and cynical m versus hopeful skepticism versus, I guess all. And i'll use the following examples. Um I subscribed to an instagram account that I like very much, which essentially just gives me images of beautiful animals in their like, in their ultimate essence.

It's a account biaggi m joe arti who works for national geographic and he's created what's called the photo r he's trying to get images of all the world's animals um that really capture their essence um and many of them are endangered and some very close to extinction. Others are more you know more prolific uh right now nonetheless I I think of that account is all goodness, all ban event. And then at the other extreme, I subscribed to an animal can called .

nature is medal to .

actually elaborate with nature metal a on A A great White shark grabbed tuna video that that I didn't take, but someone I was with talk, and we ve got the permission to post IT. In any event, natures s medal is all about the harshness of nature.

And then I think about, like the planet earth series, hosted by David at burgh and so forth, which service as a mixture of beautiful duckling know and but then also animals hunting each other and dying of all the age of starvation and so the full rate. So I think about that as an example of if you look at nature is meet a long enough. Um it's a very cool account.

Highly recommend people follow all three of these accounts. But if you look at IT long enough, you get the impression 礼物， nature is hard. Life is hard out there and IT can be. You look at the start tory account and you get the impression that, you know, animals are just beautiful. They're just being them yeah right and um and he has such a he has a gift for capturing the essence of insects, reptiles and mammals and everything in between.

So when I think about social media, or I even just think about our outlook onto the landscape of real life, non virtual life, if you like, the the human brain potentially can like all these things. But what you're describing in cynicism is the people that for whatever reason, they're skew toward this view that, like life is hard, and therefore I need to protect myself and protect others at all times yeah in reality, how dynamic is cynical? M, and what you earlier described, how IT can be domain specific but um you know if somebody is pretty cynical, you know and there you know other than twenty five they're outside the or developmental plasticity range. You know, what are the things that they can do on a daily basis to either tune down their cynicism or create room for this hopeful scepticism in a way that enriches them? Let's just start with them because there, after all, their cnc like can we can't bake them with a the good that y'll do for the world but y'll do that too yeah um you know what what are some tools that we can all apply to its being less signal?

It's it's a brilliant question and and you're right. I think I think a lot of us are very tuned into the medical side of life. And heavy medal is great.

But, you know, life is not all metal. So how do we retune ourselves? I I think about this a lot, in part because over the last several years, I haven't just been studying cynical m.

I've been trying to counteracted in myself and in others. So i've focused on practical everyday things that I can do. Uh, and I guess they come in a bunch of category is i'm going to try to stick through them.

But but I I really want to hear your thoughts. The first has to do with our mindsets and the ways that we that we approach our own thinking. So I like to engage in a practice that I call being skeptical of my cynicism um so that is in essence, taking tools from cognitive behav behavior therapy and applying them to my cynical inferences.

So again, my defauts mode, my factory settings are pretty suspicious. I want to lay my cards on the table as iron a given what I study, but there we are. So I often find myself in new situations, suspecting people, mistrusting people, wondering if they might advantage of me.

And what I do these days that I didn't do in the past is, say, what, William, in exactly where is this coming from? Your scientist, defend your influence, defend your hypothesis, right? What evidence do you have to back IT up? And very often I find that the evidence is thin to nonexistent, right? So that chAllenge that just under a thing of wait a minute, are you sure no unit can can tap into a little bit of intellectual humility?

A second thing that I try to do is apply what my lab, and I call a reciprocate mindset, that is understanding that, yes, people vary in how trust really they are. But what you do also matters. Research finds that when you trust people, they're more likely to become trustworthy because they want to reciprocate.

You've honor them in this small way and so they step up. It's known as earned trust in economics uh, and when you miss trust people, they become less trustworthy. So in my lab, we found that when you teach people this, when you teach people to own the influence that they have on others, they are more willing to be trusting.

And when you're more trusting than, of course, the other person at recipes cades, which which again turns into this positive cycle. So I try, when I make a decision as to whether or not i'm going to trust somebody, I think the default is to say, well, i'm taking on this risk. Is this a good choice for me? And I tried to rotate that a little bit and say, what am I doing for the relationship here? Is this act of trust may be a gift to this other person.

How can IT positively influence who they become in the course of this interaction? And then a third thing on the sort of mindset side, and then we can get to some behaviors, is what I call social savoring. Um I do this lot with my kids.

Actually, you saverin is a general term for appreciating good things while they happen to related to gratitude. But gratitude is more appreciating the things that have happened to us in the past that are good savings is grab this moment right now and think about IT. So my kids and I started saverin practices a couple years ago. I call IT classes. So say today were going to do an ice cream eating class or we're going to do a sunset watching class.

I are you adopting applications .

are coming in now. We're evaluating them on a rolling .

basis and a graduate color.

But so we'll just sit there, you know, and eat ice cream slowly, not so that IT melts, but will say, know, what you enjoying about this is the texture is at the flavor. What do you want to remember about this moment? And I noticed more recently, while working on this book, that all of this was sensory sunsets, some results, ice cream, you name IT.

But IT wasn't very social. And what they were hearing from me about other people was negatively skill, because gossip is negatively secured, right? If somebody cut me off in traffic while i'm driving them to summer camp, they learn all about that person, but they don't learn about the people who are politely following traffic laws all around us is right, which is ninety plus percent of drivers.

And so I started a practice of social saverin, where I try to share with my kids positive things that I notice about other people. You could call IT positive gossip as well. And one thing that I noticed is that that habit of saverin for them changed my mental processing, right? IT actually.

Changed what I noticed because, of course, if you're trying to tell somebody about something, you look for examples that you can tell them about. So a habit of action, of speech in that case became became a habit of mind. So those three things being skeptical of my cynical m, adopting a rest of proceded mindset in social saverin, those are, those are three of the psychological pieces. And I can get to some actions. But but I yeah, I wonder what you think of these.

I love those three, and I love the distinguishing features of savings versus gratitude because there's so much data to support gratitude practices. And uh I don't think i've ever heard those two distinguished from one another. Clearly saverin things is um going to be is equally powerful towards our neurochemistry in our well being. And I love that you include both sensory and interpersonal aspects to this. These are highly actionable and i'm sure people are as excited about them as I am because um you know all this knowledge from the laboratory is indeed wonderful but of course we always want to know what can we do now that you've made such a strong case for tuning down our cynisca little bit in order to make ourselves smarter, Better, happier, in in touch with with all on a more regular basis? Would love to hear about some of the actions one can take as well.

Yeah so if you imagine the mindset shifts that i've talked about as thinking more like a scientist about the social world, then the second step to me is to act more like a scientist in the social world. Uh, the monk and author pema children, great, great writer once has, is written beautifully about treating your life like an experiment.

You know, in this moment you could interrupt the default, you could interrupt the patterns and look around more carefully. And I try to do that, and I encourage other people to do that as well. You know, one form of this is what I call taking leaps of faith on other people, right? Collecting more social data requires risk.

So I try to do that. I tried to take more risks, become less risk averse in a social context. Now this is not to say, you know, that I share my bank information with the prince who is gonna hire me, fourteen million dollars, right? You need to be calculated.

You need to be smart and safe in the risks that you take. But I would argue that many of us are far too risk averse in the social world. And there are a lots of ways that I try to do this, and lots of ways that people can do this.

One is to just be more open to the social world. I'm an introvert. I thc. You've said you're an introvert as well as that. Is that true? Um yeah and so as introverts, we tend to think that the social world is may be tiring and we need to recharge on our own completely valid experience that all the time I think that sometimes my introversion morphs into something else where I underestimate the joy of social contact.

You know, there are so many times that before a dinner party, I would pay an embarrassing amount of money for the other party to cancel on me. I don't want to be the person to cancel, but I I would feel so relieved if they cancelled. But then while i'm there and afterwards, I feel totally fulfilled by the experience, it's a little bit like running. Running is another thing that I love, but there are many times that before I run, I think, gosh, I really don't want to do this.

And then afterwards, i'm so grateful to have done so there's a bunch of research that finds that people in general like are like this if you ask them to forecast what IT would be like to talk with a stranger um to open up about a problem that that they are having with a friend, to express gratitude to try to help somebody even to have a disagreement around on ideological grounds people forecast that these conversations would be awful, awkward, crying, painful uh and in the case of disagreement, harmful even uh this is work from nick elie, Juliana shorter and many others by the way, on something that is under. And because we have these forecasts, we simply don't pursue the conversations. We don't go deeper.

We stay on the surface. Nick, Juliana and others then chAllenge people. They say, go and do this, have this conversation and report back. And people's actual experiences are vastly more positive and more fulfilling than their forecasts. So I try to remember this in my own life.

I tried to realize when my forecasts are too risk averse and too negative and say, let me just jump in, you know, let me take this chance if IT goes badly, well, fine. And if IT, if IT goes well, even Better. The second piece here, though, is not just to take those risks, but to document their effects.

right? I, I, I call this encounter accounting, right? So in essence, gathering new data from the world is great, but if you forget those data well, then the effects might be short lived.

I try to really remember when a social encounter is a mismatch with my expectations. I have a relative who, for instance, ince, i'd disagree with politically quite a bit. And when I was working on on this book, I said, let me take a chance.

We've known each other for thirty years. We've never talk politics. Let me try. And so I invited to have this conversation about an issue we really disagree on. And we did not agree by the end of the conversation, but IT was an immensely deep and meaningful conversation. And I actually felt like I knew her Better, even though we've been close for decades. And I could just say, well, that was nice and then forget all about IT and imagine that any future conversations on disagreement IT would be terrible but I tried to write down in my in my journal sort of this is what happened this is how counteracted my expectations try to log in that learning from the social world so that pleasant surprises hopefully in as .

surprising anymore I love those practices um and thank you for reinforcing the process of reinforcing the the here is because many times i'll be listening to an audio book. Think of something when i'm running and i'll put IT into my you voice memo s or note to my phone and then I moved them to this very notebook or another similar to IT and i'll go back and read IT.

But many things don't don't get pass through the the filters that um I forget because I didn't do that. And we know this is one of the best ways to solidify information is to think about experiences and information after being exposed to IT. This is true.

Studying this is true clearly for a emotional learning and in our own personal evolution. Which brings me to another example of somebody from that I don't know what to call them, is that so a philosophy, well ness, self help space. You mentioned payment children, yeah, wonderful writer. There's someone else, more lesson that space buyin kd, who a lot of her work is about chAllenging beliefs by simply asking questions about our core beliefs.

This is something that i've started to explore a bit, like one could have the idea that um you know good people always, you know I don't know, show up on time and when we all love to be punched and as an academic confess for me everything starts ten minutes after the hour so we we're consistently on time but late right then on academy s my friends from the military have a saying which is five minutes early as on time on time is late and if you're late you rather bring lunch no so that think in any event the the practice that SHE promotes um in in essence is to take core belief and then just start chAllenging IT from a number of different directions. Is that always true? You are the cases where that's not true.

What would that look like? It's said as a way to really deconstruct one's own core beliefs, which is I think, a bit of what you're talking about and I feel like this could go in um at least two directions. You can have a core belief that leads in the direction of cynics that you can deconstruct by just simply asking questions um you know is that always true there are there every instances where that's not true um and what would IT mean if that weren't true in a given instance, this sort of thing? And then on the other side, where we tend to erode hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynicism, um there too I I could imagine that would be useful to explore hopeful skepticism also as a scientist.

I yes, are there cases where hopeful skepticism here are going to be cynical can really get us into trouble? yes. Yeah for instance, anyway, that these I obviously I haven't run a study on this just because I I came up with this example on the fly. But does what I just describe fit more lesson to the framework that .

you're describing? absolutely. I think that it's in essence, being skeptical about our beliefs, putting them through their paces, right, kicking the tires on our own beliefs.

And again, this reminds me of cognitive behavioral therapy, right? Prison's socially anxious might tell their therapist, I think all my friends secretly hate me. They might believe that to their core, IT might affect every decision that they make, and the therapies might chAllenge them, and they will wait.

What are what's the evidence that you have for that? Are there any instances in your entire life where that seemed to not be true? And to your point from bearing kit, what would you mean if IT weren't true? So this is the bedrock of one of the most successful uh, forms of therapy for depression and anxiety and phobia in in the world.

Know I do want to also, I guess, the zoom in on something that that that you're sharing there about our core beliefs because I think that in addition to testing our core beliefs, one thing that I wish we would do more is share our core beliefs because I don't think we know what each other is core beliefs are. And I think often times we think that we are more alone in our core beliefs than we actually are. So this is true in our politics, for instance, like the amount of people on from every part of the political spectrum who want more compromise, more peace and less conflict, is north of eighty percent in surveys that my lab has conducted.

But people don't know that. And so the the lack of evidence, the lack of data about what other people want is a hindrance to the goals that we actually all share. This is also true in workplaces. So in the course of my work, I i've done sort of some some different projects with school systems, hospital systems businesses. And one of the things I love doing is starting with an anonymous survey of everybody in the community.

And I ask, you know, how much do you value empathy and collaboration? How much would you prefer a workplace or community defined by CoOperation? Versus competition and invariably and and i'm talking about some places where you might imagine people would be competitive.

Invariably a supermajority of individuals in those communities want, uh, compassion, CoOperation and and collaboration, right? Much more than they want competition or isolation. So one of the things that I love to do when I speak for those groups is to say, hey, look, here's some data.

Look around you here. You've got ninety percent of people in this organization who want more CoOperation. So if you just take a look in your peripheral, most everybody around you wants that as well.

I also survey these communities and say, what do you think the average person would respond to these questions? And invariably, they're wrong. And I say, you have underestimated each other and now giving you permission to stop know.

And and I think this is one of the other actions that we can take if we're in a leadership position anywhere, right? I think that looking for more data is great. If you're a leader, you can collect those data and you can show people to themselves. You can unveil the core beliefs of your community, and often times, those core beliefs are incredibly beautiful and surprising to the people in the in in those communities, and give them what I would call that, pure pressure, but pure permission to express. We've been all along.

I love that. And one of the things that we've done on this podcast is to always invite comments and questions, critiques no and so forth um in the comments section on youtube.

And I always say and I do read all the comments and sometimes is that takes me while and i'm still sifting through them, but I think comment sections can be yes, they can be toxic and certain environments and certain context but they can also be tremendously enriching not just for the reader but for the commenter um and to see what people's core beliefs are really about now often times comments are are of a different form and that's okay that's alright um but I think that um because of the anonymity involved, I I think I can see that now through the lens of what you're saying as as a license for people to really share their core beliefs about something as something that can be really informative and really enriching. Although I I much prefer, I confess, to the model that you're presenting where people are doing this in real time, face to face supposed just online. As long as we're talking about polarization and the wish for less polarization. Um what are the data saying about the current state of affairs were recording this uh you know about what three months or so out from an election or ninety seven days or so from an election presidential election so without getting into discussions about political camps per say, um what do your data and understanding about cynicism and hopeful skepticism and tell us about um that whole process and how the uh two camps are presenting themselves there is so much to .

say about this I going to try to not give elections here but but so like so many of the themes in this conversation, right I think that the headline for me, when I look at the data on polar ization and i'm going to talk about perceived polarization as well, is too fold. One is tragic because we are underestimating one another.

And two, there is a lot of opportunity here because the delta between the world that we think we're in and the one that we're actually in is great and that and it's it's positive as well. So there's a bunch of work on political perceptions. This is work done by folks like meana, jakarta, harvard my colleague rob willer, in sociology at stanford our colleague rob willer and ah and a lot of this focuses on what people think the average member of the other side is like.

So if you're republican, what do you think the average democrats believes? What do you think they're like if you're a democrats, what do you think the average republican is like? And so i'll stop talking about republicans in democrat here because a lot of these data are bipartisan.

The bias are are pretty even across camps. And IT turns out that in all cases, we are dead wrong about who's on the other side. We're even wrong g demographically about who's on the other side.

For instance, democrats think that twenty five percent of republicans make more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year. The actual number is two percent. But the stereotype of republicans that democrats hold is that they're wealthy.

I suppose republicans vastly over restin ate the percentage of democrats who are part of the L G B T Q community, for instance. Again, it's just a cultural stereotype. So we're wrong about even who's in the other on the other side, but we're even more wrong about what they believe in, what they want.

So data suggests that there is perceived polarization. That is what we think the other side believes is much greater than real polar ization. I mean, first, while we are divided, let's stipulate that and those divisions can be really dangerous and and are, in some cases, existential.

But the division in our mind is much greater than the division that we actually have. My late friend, emb UNO, collected some data where he gathered republicans and democrats views on immigration. He said, what would you want immigration to look like? Where zero is? The borders are totally closed, and one hundred as they are totally open.

And he lauded the distributions of what that looks like. He also asked people on either side, what do you think the other side would respond if asked the same question and applied of those distributions as well. Other side.

meaning which group.

if you you're a democrat, what do you think republicans would want? And if you're republican, what would democrats want? And the distributions are totally different.

The distributions of our actual preferences are like a hill with two peaks, right? So republicans want more closed borders. Democrats want them more open, but they're not that far apart.

First of all, the means. And there's a lot of overlap in the distribution. The distributions of our perceptions are two hills on opposite sides of a landscape.

Republicans think that democrat want totally open borders and democrats to think republicans want totally closed borders. And this, the same pattern, plays out for all sorts of issues where we think the other side is much more extreme. We think the average member of the other side is much more extreme than they really are.

These also work on meta perceptions. What you think the other side thinks about you. And IT turns out that people on both sides imagine that their arrivals hate them twice as much as the arrivals really do.

There is work on democratic norms that my grade student, luis santos, collected, where we all restin ate. How anti I democratic the other side is by two times. And rob has collected data on violence.

How much do you think the other side would support violence to advance their aims? And here the orestes mates are, four hundred percent. So we think that the average person on the other side is four times as enthusiastic about violence as they really are.

We have an image in our mind of the other as violent extremists who want to burn down the system. And again, we've talked about the warped media ecosystem that we're in, and that probably contributes here. But the fact is that those misperceptions are making all the problems that we fear worse.

Because if you think that the other side is gearing up for war, what do you do? You have to defend yourself. And so we caught in this almost cycle of escalation that really very few of us want.

Now I want to be really clear here that i'm not saying that we don't have actual disagreements. I'm also not saying that there that that people on on across our political spectrum are all peaceable and all kind. There are absolutely extreme and violent people around our country that represent their political views in horrible and toxic ways.

But that's not the average. And again, I want to get back to this point that the average person underestimates the average person. Not that we underestimate everybody, but that we're wrong about most people.

And so again, to me, this is a tragedy and an opportunity, rob and meaner and lots of other people find that when you ask people to actually pay attention to the data, when you show them, hey, actually, the other side fears violence just as much as you do. When you show them that actually the other side is terrified of losing our democracy. When you show them that the other side doesn't actually hate you, that mitigates, that pulls back all of these escalator impulses. In essence, you can decrease the threat that people feel from the other side by showing them who the other side really is. I understand this is such a massive and toxic sort of environment that we're i'm not saying that hopeful skepticism will solve our our divided political landscape will solve our problems, but I do think it's worth noting how wrong we are and that being a little bit less wrong, can at least open a door, maybe let our minds wander towards the place of greater compromise and peace, which is what most people actually want.

Wow, I say that for several reasons. First of all, I ve never heard the landscape described that way and I confess I didn't know that the landscape was um as toward the center as IT turns out IT is uh I have also many theories about how media and social media and podcast for that matter, might be contributing to this perceived polarization as opposed to the reality. And there is certainly a lot to explore in terms of what we can each and all do to remedy our understanding what's going on out there as a consequence. I'll ask, can some of the same tools that you described to Better interact with one's own children, with one's own self, uh, with other individuals and in small groups, be used to sort of defragment some of the sync ism circuitry that existing us around this polarized, excuse me, perceived highly polarized political landscape?

I love that clarification. Yeah, absolutely. I think that the answer is yes. There is lots of evidence that we are actively avoiding having conversations, in part because of who we think. The other ideas. There is an amazing study that was conducted during thanksgiving of two thousand and sixteen, which as you may recall, was directly after a very a polar ized election uh and researchers used geo tracking on people's ell phones to examine whether in order to go to thanksgiving dinner, they crossed between a blue county into a red county or a red county into a blue Candy.

In other words, are they going into an using air quote, quote and enemy territory for thanksgiving dinner? And they use that as a proxy of whether they're having dinner with people they disagree with. And IT turns out that people who crossed county lines, who crossed into enemy territory against quotes, this is perceived polarization.

They had dinners that were fifty minutes shorter than people who were dining with folks who presumably they agreed with. So we're talking about for seeking pie, Andrew. There they're giving a pie in order to nt talk. With people they disagree.

And I think a lot of us are very skilled sh about these conversations because if you believe that the other side is a bunch of blood thirsty marats, why would you want to talk with them? Why have a beer with a fascist? You know, this just not a great plan.

The truth, though, is that when we can collect Better data, often times we end up with Better a, with Better perceptions. And I mean Better in two ways, one, more positive and two more accurate. Right now, again, I want to say that there are real threats in our political environment.

I'm not asking anybody to make themselves unsafe in anyway, but a, in our lab. Again, my wonderful graduates who didn't lose santos ran a study where we had about one hundred sixty people. These are focus from all over the country who took part in zoom conversations.

We made sure that they really disagreed about gun control, immigration and climate change, and we've talked about those issues. We ask into forecast what those conversations would be like, and we asked other folks to forecast what those conversations would be like. And the forecasts to went from neutral to negative.

Some people thought I won't make any difference, and other people thought I would be counterproductive. Some focus in our survey said dialogue is dead. There is no point in any of these conversations. And we then brought these folks together.

Oh, and I should say, among the people who are cynical about these conversations and who forecasts of the they would go poorly was us, the research team, luisa and I spent hours talking about what if people start to threaten each other, or dox each other, or look up each other as addresses. You know, Andrew, that we have institutional review boards that make sure that we're keeping human subjects safe. And the irb wanted all sorts of safeguards in place because we all thought that these conversations might go really poorly.

After the conversations occurred, we asked folks who had taken part of them to rate how positive they were on a one to one hundred scale. And the most common, the model response that people gave us was one hundred out of one hundred. And IT wasn't just that.

They like the conversation. They were shocked by how much they like the conversation. They also reported less negative emotion for the other side as a whole nature, es for the person that they talked with.

And they reported more intellectual humility, more openness to questioning their own views. So here are conversations that we as a culture, are actively avoiding because of our players. Our players are wrong given the data, but we don't know that. And we don't give ourselves chances to learn that we're wrong because we don't collect the data. And when we do collect the data, when we step in and take that leap of faith, take that social risk, we are shocked and humbled and feel more positive, and maybe even feel a slightly greater sense of hope that there can be some way out of this toxic environment they were all trapped in.

Well, jie, doctors, eche, thank you so much for h sharing your in incredible like we can only be described as wisdom into this area of um humanity right I mean to be a cnc um is a one potential aspect of being human um but you made very clear that we have control. There is plasticity over this aspect of ourselves if we adopt the right mindsets, apply the right practices. And you know it's so clear based on everything you ve shared today, that you know humans are Operating rationally and yet irrationally at the same time.

This i'm certainly not the first to say that um but in the context of sync m and in the context of being happier individuals and families and couples and groups, that to really take a hard look at how cynical we are and to start to make even minor inroads into that through belief testing you know, I wrote down as we were talking that what I really feel you're encouraging us to do crack me from wrong is to do both internal and external reality testing in an effort to move us away toward internal and external polarization and you know I can think of any higher calling than that. And your giving us the tools. And those tools are supported by data.

These aren't ous ideas, are they are data supported ideas. And I just want to thank you for your incredible generosity in coming here today to talk about those ideas. Your book is phenomenal.

I already learned so much from I highly encourage people to read IT. And what you shared with us today is phenomenal. And I do hope to have you back again to talk about another topic that you are expert in, which is empathy.

But we'll have to all wait with bated breath for that, myself included. Once again, I just want to thank you for your time the incredible work that you're doing and the evolution that you're taking us on. So on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, thank you ever so much.

Andrew. This has been an absolutely delightful conversation and and I will say my forecasts of IT was very high and IT has exceeded that forecast. Um I also just want to take a moment to thank you for your work as a science communicator, as somebody who believes in not just trying to generate knowledge but also to share knowledge.

I think that it's absolutely one of the most important services that we can do as folks who have been trained and learned all this stuff to bring that information to as many people as we can. And I think it's just it's an incredible mission and clearly has had such wonderful impact. It's it's an honor to be part of that conversation and and to be part of that effort.

Thank you. I'll take that in. And um it's a labor of love and an honor and privilege to sit here today with you. So thank you ever so much and please do come back again. I would love that.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with doctor jm zai to learn more about his work and to find a link to his new book. Hope for cynics, please see the links in the show. Note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please describe our youtube channel.

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